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We7 to offer breaking news with your streaming music

Here’s an interesting move, Spotify competitor We7 has signed a deal to bring realtime breaking news to its service.

The deal with GMG Radio will allow users to switch from streaming music to news at will and We7 CEO Steve Purdham says “This partnership marries high quality news production and delivery with the new paradigm of On-demand music. Radio and Cloud based music can learn a great deal from each other”

The question is, will you want to listen to news in the same app as you stream music? Given the lack of precedent for this feature it seems like an unusually risky move for the famously caution company. We7 sat on a fully-working iPhone app for months before releasing it when they said it was economically viable to do so.

Purdham has been damning of Spotify’s money-burning approach to its business, and earlier this year issued a press release trumpeting that We7 was the first company to make steaming music “add up”. Having expanded into breaking news, we wonder whether We7 has seen a forthcoming threat from bigger players in the market (Apple’s much-rumoured streaming iTunes service, for example) and is making its longterm plan not to be purely a streaming music service but to serve up a wider range of media.

Martin Bryant was Editor-at-Large at The Next Web. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new. You can find him on Twitter, on Snapchat as Martinsfp, subscribe to him on Facebook and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.